torme

In regards to your better election design, I have three main complaints.

1. Having candidates review each other seems like a good way to have the worst candidates float to the top. If you're in a contest with your competitors, given the option to knock the best options out of the race, wouldn't you do so? It seems like you're taking an overly optimistic view of human nature.

2. Having a large portion of the election based on randomness seems like it would diminish voter turnout even further. I understand its an attempt to reduce the noise created by the surrounded hype of a candidate, and that it would cause people to research these people on their own, but I dont think that would happen. I think people would see 2 random people, have no interest in either of them at a surface value, and then not vote as a result.

3. I dislike your criteria for selecting candidates, particularly for financial value. I don't think that a wealthy person is necessarily any more qualified than a poor man. I like the idea that the common man is able to obtain a position of power, regardless of background, but maybe I've watched Mr Smith Goes to Washington too many times.

I do agree that there's an issue with polarization, but I think that at the end of the day, you'll still have two candidates, and that you'll end up with polarization anyways. At the same time, I think there are problems with having too many candidate options, as I mentioned in my other post in this thread. Maybe 2 is too few, and 10 is too many, and theres a happy medium in the middle somewhere.

I think people throw around ideas like this without considering the side effects. One problem is that if you remove our bipartisanship you introduce the possibility of electing someone where a small group of extremists is able to gain a majority vote because the rest of the candidate pool is so spread out.

Imagine an election with 15 candidates. 14 of them are democrat/liberals and 1 of them is Neo-Nazi. Who wins? This might be an extreme case, but if you divide up the voting sensibilities of the majority, you risk the chance that a smaller group of like-minded people may overrun the race.

Similar instances of this have occurred in the past, such as in France's 2002 election, where Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of elections because he was running against many other candidates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Le_Pen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_2...

I'm not saying that a partied system is a good one, but it's does solve some problems that should be considered before you dismiss the idea entirely.

edit: added link to french election page

I don't understand moves like this.

Why do companies seem to put developers in such poor positions? In platforms like this, it seems that your customers are in a large part, the developers. But instead of trying to lure them in, it's viewed more as a privilege to get on their platform than an attempt to gather the best software. I understand the desire to get on a large platform like Xbox, but isn't it at least somewhat of a concern that if Sony releases a developers eden for the platform that they'll lose business?

I suppose the problem is a lack of competition on any of the platforms, to my knowledge. If you're a developer you would want a game available on as many platforms as possible, regardless of any rules imposed on you. If you want your game on Xbox the only way to get it on is through microsoft, correct?

If not, it seems that someone should make a developer-centric distribution platform.

This is a very cool idea, with a lot of potential.

I have a few design suggestions to toss your way.

1. I mentioned this in another thread the other day, but I would drop the moving links that appear when you hover over. Moving navigation almost always is a bad idea, in my opinion. It is difficult to accurately click on what you want, especially on smaller images. On top of that, it seems to behave inconsistently. Sometimes when I mouse over they don't appear, sometimes they do.

2. On the same lines, the popup has a big plus sign on it, that briefly turns to a minus sign, before redirect me to the signup page. Clicking on the image still brings me to a view of the product, so whats the purpose of that button?

3. Check all/Uncheck all buttons for the filters.

Other than that, I think the design is pretty nice. As you stated, the store design layout feels very clean and I like that the view of products is kept simple. Good luck!

Off topic here, but I find these rather obnoxious. They're almost like mystery meat navigation in that they're state isn't consistent. You have a disappearing navigation element, so a user might see it at one point, misunderstand what causes it to appear, and then not be able to find something on the page that they saw before.

On the other hand, they do grab the users attention, but I wonder what the ratio of successful clicks is to frustrated users.

Just my two cents, and pointing out that at least some users don't think they're neat.

I guess just generate the permalink in the action and redirect to that instead of having it in the form itself.

Something like:

Form: /reworder/generate

Action: Generates text, creates permalink and then redirects user to that permalink.

In the web world this pattern is common, called redirect-after-post. I'm not sure if thats much help, I've only used python in the context of the Pylons framework (and have only a few days experience with it at that). If you need more guidance let me know and I'll try and clarify.

edit: Link to redirect after post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post/Redirect/Get

edit2: I should also say this is a pretty sweet project, sorry if I just listed criticisms.

Completely unrelated to your write up but theres a bug. In FF if I back up and resubmit it doesn't update to the new text. I still see my first submission.

Im also pretty sure that it is possible to pirate steam games. In fact, I recall seeing a torrent that advertised itself as being a steam install, and had instructions to install the game directly into steam, so in a way it was actually leveraging that platform for piracy. I'm at work so I can't really provide evidence of this at the moment.

That said, I do think that platforms like this reduce piracy in general. Gabe Newell, in reference to steam, said something like "People didn't buy games because piracy was beating us at a service level" (not a direct quote). Having an app store like this reduces the headache of having to go to the store in some ways.

I went to Northeastern and my undergrad degree was in "Information Science" program which is a mix of HCI/Usability/Com Sci, though it's an unfortunate name for the major as most people have no idea what it means. There was very little focus on web technologies and more of a focus on interaction principles as you said. I don't know that I wanted to take an HTML/CSS/JS class, but I always wished that my major involved some more design type classes to hone people into that type of career more. I love doing front end work, but I think at this point I lack the design skills to do be an effective employee in that sense.

Very cool, I like this a lot. I've seen a lot of aggregate tools with google maps like this that seem to have a better sense of how I actually search for things.

Minor criticisms and suggestions:

1. It'd be awesome if this could expand to all aspects of yelp and not just the restraurants. I tried searching for laundromat and got no results, but this search gives results on yelp.

2. It'd be nice to be able to filter by a few of the snippets. The main thing I'd like to be able to do is show only negative reviews. Often times I want to hear what people didn't like about a place more than what they did.

3. It's not really clear what expanding the snippets does. I think it's showing similar snippets, but I'm not 100% sure of that. One weird example:

+ The staff's not 100 % attentive

    -The dining room is cozy and intimate.

    -The deco is colorful

I'm not sure how these are related.

But as a whole, very cool.

This response is frustrating because I feel like you didn't read my comment, but instead honed in on a single phrase, "complex equations". Even in the context of that sentence that's a moot point. If you'd like, replace "solve complex equations" with what you consider to be the best, most useful, fun part about math, and it does not change my point. I'm sorry I chose an example that seems to have offended you, but I do understand that there's more to math than solving complex equations.

That said, to re-summarize my point tersely: If someone doesn't like a particular field, I still feel that they can be successful programmers by focusing on fields that they do like which are also useful.

You have a point in some ways, but I think that there are many counterpoints to this as well. Ever sit in an airport terminal and hear over the PA that todays threat level is orange? Some people might also question the necessity of such devices, which instead of alleviating fears, creates them. A lot of these types of measures only solidify some peoples irrational fears as being legitimate.

I was pretty good at math in school, but I dont like math. Therefore I haven't focused on it.

I think your assumption is that people think like: I like programming. I'm bad at math. Math doesn't help my programming anyways.

Instead I think people think like: I like programming I'm bad at math, so I don't like it. I'm going to look at other fields to improve my programming.

I think the problem is, and the author hints at it, is that people tend to over glorify the importance of math at the expense of drowning out other fields, like prose.

In some fields like web programming, I would say that yes, my time is better spent learning how to write understandable code instead of how to solve complex equations. As a result, I probably won't ever program video games, but thats ok, games take a lot of math, and I wouldn't enjoy that anyways. It's not that I'm lazy and just don't want to get better at programming. I just want to get better at programming in ways that I enjoy the most.

With infinite time, I would certainly do it both.

Precisely. Stores aren't just competing to get users, they're competing to get developers. If one store offers a higher profit margin for developers then that store will have the best apps.

If someone could launch a competitor to the Apple App store, and say "I'm going to take half the margin that apple takes from app developers", I think developers would flock to that store, and then so would customers.

Competition improves products. If anything, I'd think that it'd be better for developers.

Agreed, as an occasional user of After Effects, I can state with certainty that buggy software in media editing definitely exists.

I totally agree with this sentiment, but you do have two ways that people want to interact with the data. Scrub by day, scrub by hour, depending on what level of detail is wanted. You might need still two controls, but they should at least be the same type of controls.

Alternatively, you could add a drop down to select the granularity and then use a single slider control.

Edit: This is based on just seeing the reddit one, BTW. I tried to check out yours, but it seems that it's popularity has flooded the server.